Author: Coindesk

JPMorgan cut its CleanSpark (CLSK) price target to $10.50 from $12.50 while maintaining its neutral rating on the shares. It reduced the Iren (IREN) price target to $9.50 from $11 and kept its overweight rating. Underweight-rated Marathon Digital’s (MARA) price objective was lowered to $12 from $14, and overweight-rated Riot Platforms’ (RIOT) price objective was trimmed to $9.50 from $12. Read the full article here

Bitcoin traded between $60,000 and $62,000, keeping the broader crypto market steady with observers split on what the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will say at Friday’s Jackson Hole meeting. “Given the good CPI reading last Wednesday, we’re likely to get a dovish Powell tone Friday,” Amberdata said in the weekly newsletter, hinting at a potential favorable development for risk assets, including cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, the crypto-options-focused tech platform SignalPlus said Powell might be cautious. Over at Deribit, the options market isn’t anticipating a Powell-induced volatility explosion. “Single-day BTC options indicate a 2.5% price swing [in either direction],” Martin Cheung, head…

“Risk markets might be more disappointed as Powell might want to do their best to give themselves some wiggle room against the four cumulative cuts priced into the year-end,” Augustine Fan, head of insights at SOFA, told CoinDesk in an interview. “That said, Jackson Hole has generally been a ‘risk-positive’ stock even in the past, so expect traders to be better buyers on dips.” Read the full article here

Still, interest rates are not the only driver behind a comeback in DeFi. There are also crypto-native factors at work. The growth in stablecoin supply, which has expanded by about $40 billion since January, is crucial because “stablecoins are the backbone of DeFi protocols,” Steno said. Read the full article here

“Overall, we’re disappointed by today’s ruling, but we’re prepared and willing to comply with the court’s decision,” a Kraken spokesperson said in a statement sent via email. “We’re pleased the judge understood the nuances in this case, and recognised the challenges in applying existing regulatory frameworks to innovative technologies.” Read the full article here

CryptoQuant cited its demand indicator, which tracks the difference between the daily total bitcoin block rewards and the daily change in the number of bitcoin that has not moved in one year or more. Bitcoin rewards earned by miners are typically sold to cover operations, but an increase in selling from large holders indicates a waning demand for the asset. Read the full article here

The “first year is all about onboarding Web3 people, because technology-wise and the community-wise, it is a little bit early to onboard the general users,” Watanabe told CoinDesk. “And then phase two, within two years, we’re going to onboard Sony products, such as, Sony Bank, Sony Music, Sony Pictures and so on. So we would like to integrate Web3 and blockchain technology into Sony’s product. And in three years, we would like to onboard not only Sony, but also all enterprises and all general dapps on the top of it.” Read the full article here

In 2020, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed imposing know-your-customer requirements on unhosted wallets, drawing immense backlash from the crypto industry. This week, the Treasury Department formally withdrew the proposal. Read the full article here

“For us, why we’re very excited to have Franklin Templeton’s Benji app and platform deployed on Avalanche is really twofold,” said Morgan Krupetsky, Head of Capital Markets and Institutions at Ava Labs. “On the one hand, the money market funds contract in and of itself and potentially as a payment mechanism represents a foundational and fundamental piece to a broader tokenized asset ecosystem and capabilities.” Read the full article here

“NEAR validators no longer have to maintain the state of a shard locally and can retrieve all the information they need to validate state changes, or ‘state witnesses,’ from the network,” according to the press release. “This both improves single-shard performance as well as adds capacity for more shards on the network.” Read the full article here